According to the U.S. Occupational Health and Safety (“OSHA”) technical manual, “back disorders can develop gradually as a result of microtrauma brought about by repetitive activity over time or can be the product of a single traumatic event . . . acute back injuries can be the immediate result of improper lifting techniques and/or lifting loads that are too heavy for the back to support.” See OSHA technical manual, Section VII, Chapter I, “Back Disorders and Injuries,” publicly available from OSHA's website. As the OSHA Manual then goes on to note, “although back injuries account for no work-related deaths, they . . . are one of the leading causes of disability for people in their working years and afflict over 600,000 employees each year with a cost of about $50 billion annually in 1991 according to NIOSH . . . [and] the frequency and economic impact of back injuries and disorders on the work force are expected to increase over the next several decades as the average age of the work force increases and medical costs go up.”
Given the enormous health and economic consequences of lifting-related back injuries, there have been a large number of devices developed that purport to be useful for better lifting safety. See, e.g., the numerous examples of such devices within U.S. Classification Class/Subclass 602/19. However, in 1994 a “Back Belt Working Group” of the National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety (“NIOSH”) reviewed commercially available lifting belts and concluded that such “back belts do not mitigate hazards to workers posed by repeated lifting, pushing, pulling, twisting, or bending” and that, in light of “insufficient data indicating that typical industrial back belts significantly reduce the biomechanical loading of the trunk during manual lifting,” this working group concluded that 1) back belts are not recommended for preventing injuries; and, 2) back belts are not personal protective equipment (“PPE”). See NIOSH publication 94-122, publicly available from the website for the Center for Disease Control (CDC). See also NIOSH's 1996 summary of these results, NIOSH publication 94-127, October, 1996, publicly available from the CDC's website.
In light of the above health and economic consequences of lifting-related back injuries and the lack of suitable devices for preventing such injuries, there is a great need for the development of better lift-assistance devices.